At Vigyanlabs, we are researching on ways and means to build 'clean and green' solutions that help reduce power consumption. We are experts in Intelligent Power Management (TM). Based on our extensive research on how power is consumed across electronic and electro-mechanical systems, we at Vigyanlabs have pioneered the concept of fine-grained, non-intrusive, distributed power management for IT infrastructure. Listed here are snippets about our ongoing research...

Wednesday, 14 November 2012

Application Sensors and Intelligent Power Management Part #1

What aids powers Intelligent Power Management is the concept of Application Sensors. Just like we have temperature, light, proximity sensors which sense and aid the instruments in better control, an equivalent component in the IT Infrastructure is the Application Sensor. Application Sensors sense which applications are running and what components of the hardware they use and provide the intelligence to selectively turn on or turn off hardware components in a system. Multiple applications can be running on a given system, however what is important is the critical list of applications. Let us consider the case of a Laptop, while doing a power point presentation (or any other presentation application) - the display output (rather the external projector/display) has to be on, whereas other components like disks can be powered off if they are not in use. When the presentation is completed, after power point is closed, the display output can be turned off if the user is not using the system. Consider the conventional power management where we tend to disable the power management entirely while doing a presentation. Similarly if a background application is doing a file download or transfer, while the user is away from the desktop, the display can be turned off, cpu can be in a lower power mode. If the download completes and the user is still away from the desktop, the system can be allowed to go to either standby or hibernate thus saving power.

IPMPlus provides few built in application sensors for applications which do download, file copy, presentation (power point). In addition user can define his/her own application sensors and selectively turn on/off hardware components and thus save power. To summarize Application Sensors provide the intelligence to selectively turn-on or turn-off hardware components of a system while the system is in use and helps us to save power without interrupting the users work. In the next article I will talk about how to define application sensors.